The Memory of Fire Trilogy: Genesis, Faces and Masks, and Century of the Wind

by Eduardo Galeano

  The Sevillian Pedro Luis Enríquez goes off to ten years in prison for having affirmed that by taking a rooster to a field where there was no sound of dogs, and cutting its head off at midnight, one would find a small stone like a hazelnut, rubbing one’s lips with which would make the first pretty woman encountered die of love for the one doing this, and that killing a cat in January and inserting a bean into each of its joints and burying it, the beans growing from it, if bitten while looking at oneself in the mirror, would have the virtue of making one invisible; and because he said he was a tough fellow and a healer, in token of which he had a cross on his breast and another on the roof of his mouth, and claimed that in prison he saw splendors and smelled the sweetest of fragrances.

  (137)

  1593: Guarapari

  Anchieta

  Ignacio de Loyola pointed to the horizon and ordered: “Go, and set fire to the world!”

  José de Anchieta was the youngest of all the apostles who brought the message of Christ, the good news, to the jungles of Brazil. Forty years later, the Indians call him Caraibebé, man with wings, and they say that by making the sign of the cross Anchieta wards off storms and turns a fish into a ham and a dying man into an athlete. Choirs of angels descend from the sky to announce to him the arrival of galleons or the attacks of enemies, and God raises him from the earth when he kneels to say his prayers. His skinny body, burned by his hair shirt, sends off rays of light when he flagellates himself, sharing the torments of God’s only son.

  Brazil will be grateful to him for other miracles. From the hand of this tattered saint have come the first poems written in this land, the first Tupí-Guaraní grammar, and the first theatrical works, sacramental mystery plays in the indigenous language, which transmit the Gospel mixing native personages with Roman emperors and Christian saints. Anchieta has been Brazil’s first schoolmaster and physician and the discoverer and chronicler of this land’s animals and plants in a book that tells how the guarás change the color of their plumage, how the peixe-boi lays its eggs in the eastern rivers, and how the porcupine lives.

  At sixty he continues founding cities and building churches and hospitals; on his bony shoulders he carries heavy beams along with the Indians. As if inspired by his clean and humble luminosity, the birds seek him out and people seek him out. He walks many leagues without complaining or letting them carry him in nets, through these regions where all has the color of heat and all is born and decays in an instant to be born again, fruit that becomes honey, water, death, seed of new fruits: the land boils, the sea boils with slow fire, and Anchieta writes on the sand, with a stick, his verses of praise to the Creator of everlasting life.

  (10 and 38)

  1596: London

  Raleigh

  Choreographer of tobacco, swaggering military artificer, Sir Walter Raleigh emits snakes of smoke from his nose and rings and spirals of it from his mouth as he says: “If they cut my head off, it will fall happily with my pipe between my teeth.”

  “You stink,” comments his friend.

  There is no one else in the tavern except a small black slave who waits patiently in the corner. Raleigh is telling how he discovered Earthly Paradise in Guyana the previous year, over there where El Dorado lies hidden. He licks his lips recalling the flavor of iguana eggs and closes his eyes describing the fruits and the leaves that never fall from the treetops.

  “Listen, brother,” he says. “This play of yours about the young lovers … Yes, that one, set in those forest glades, just marvelous. Set it in Verona and it smells of the cage. You got the wrong background, my dear man. That air over there …”

  Raleigh’s friend, a baldhead with mischievous eyes, knows that this Guyana is a swamp where the sky is always black with mosquitos, but he listens in silence and nods his head because he also knows that Raleigh isn’t lying.

  (198)

  1597: Seville

  A Scene in Jail

  He was wounded and mutilated by Turks. He was attacked by pirates and scourged by Moors. He was excommunicated by the priests. He was in prison in Algiers and in Castro del Río. Now he is a prisoner in Seville. Seated on the floor beside the stone pallet, he dips his pen in the inkpot and wonders, eyes fixed on the candle flame, his good hand poised in the air.

  Is it worthwhile to insist? King Philip’s reply still hurts, when for the second time he asked for a job in America: Seek what befits you over here. If things have changed since then, they have changed for the worse. Before, he had at least the hope of a response. Since that time the black-clad king, detached from the world, is not talking to anyone except his own phantoms within the walls of the Escorial.

  Miguel de Cervantes, alone in his cell, does not write to the king. He does not ask for any vacant office in the Indies. On a blank sheet he begins to relate the misadventures of a poet-errant, one of those knights whose lance is on the rack, shield rusting steed skin-and-bone, hound run away.

  Melancholy sounds ring through the prison. He does not hear them.

  (46 and 195)

  1598: Potosí

  History of Floriana Rosales, Virtuous Woman of Potosí (Abbreviated Version of the Chronicle by Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela)

  Because of her great beauty ever since the cradle, like a delicate pretty flower, and because her mother’s name was Ana, they baptized her Floriana.

  Schooled in virtue in the seclusion of the house, the dazzling young lady always avoided seeing and being seen, but this in itself set on fire the desires of suitors who surrounded her since she was twelve. Among them, those who most successfully pursued their suit were Don Julio Sánchez Farfán, mine owner, Captain Rodrigo de Albuquerque, and the governor of Tucumán, who passed this way en route to Lima and lingered in Potosí after spotting Floriana in church.

  Out of pure spite, seeing himself rejected, the governor of Tucumán challenged Floriana’s father to a duel, and they drew swords by a spring and cut each other about until some ladies, not without courage, interposed themselves.

  Floriana burned with fury to see her father wounded and determined to avenge it with her own hand. She sent word to the governor that on the next night she would await him in a certain shop, where she wished to speak to him without witnesses.

  The governor donned his best clothes—a department in which he was excessively vain, that abominable vice in men who have studied in the school of Heliogabalus, of whom Herodiano said that he despised Roman and Greek woolen clothing and wore gold and purple with precious stones in the Persian style, as Lampridio records. The governor arrived punctually, exquisitely arrayed, and at the designated hour Floriana appeared bringing amid the lovely flowers of her face the poisonous asp of her anger. Taking a broad and well-sharpened razor out of her sleeve, she rushed at him like a lioness to cut his face, hurling many an insult at him. The governor fended off the blade with his hand and produced a dagger. Alert to the danger, Floriana threw over his face a bundle of cloth, behind which she was able to seize in both hands a stout stick which there and then sealed his fate. She gave the governor of Tucumán such a whack that he fell flat.

  Heavyhearted and scared, Floriana’s parents tried to hide her in their house, but it was not possible. The magistrate, the highest justice and police authority, came running and Floriana had no alternative to going up to her room and throwing herself out of the window into the street. God willed her skirt to catch on a projection from the window frame and she hung from it head downward.

  A servant who knew Don Julio Sánchez Farfán and knew he loved her mistress told him to go to the alley behind the houses and see if Floriana was there, because she had just thrown herself from the window. But as Captain Rodrigo de Albuquerque saw Don Julio secretly talking to the servant, he followed him to the alley.

  Don Julio arrived just when the afflicted Floriana, who had been suspended for some time, was pleading in mortal fear for help, saying that she was choking. Her knightly lover approached and, stretching out his arms, took her by the shoulders
and gave her a hard pull, tumbling with her to the ground.

  At that moment Captain Rodrigo turned up and with amorous words covered Floriana with his cape and raised her up. Seeing this, Don Julio, aflame with jealousy, got to his feet and taking out a dagger plunged it into the captain, calling him a scurvy traitor. With a mortal wound in his chest, the captain fell to the ground imploring for confession, hearing which Floriana cursed her fate and the ordeals of her honor and departed at full speed.

  Floriana put on Indian clothing to escape from this town of Potosí, but when she was about to get on a mule somebody tipped off the magistrate, who came to the spot to put her in prison. When the magistrate saw Floriana, the blind child known as Cupid pierced his heart through with a terrible arrow. Panting, he took her by the hands and carried her off to the palace.

  At ten o’clock that night, the hour when she had to go to the magistrate’s bedroom, Floriana tied a rope to the balcony and let herself down into the hands of Don Julio, who awaited her below. The damsel told Don Julio that before moving a single step he must swear the security of her person and purity.

  Seeing the danger they ran, for the flight had already been discovered, Don Julio took Floriana on his shoulders and ran, carrying her to the far-off Plaza del Gato. He flew over stones and mud, in a bath of sweat, and when he could finally sit down to rest and lowered Floriana from his back, he suddenly collapsed.

  Thinking that he had just fainted, she put Don Julio’s head in her lap. But noticing that he was dead, she sprang up with a start and fled to the barrios of San Lorenzo, in the month of March of that year 1598.

  There she remained in concealment, resolved to maintain perpetual chastity and to continue till the end of her days being an obedient servant of the Lord.

  (21)

  Spanish Couplets to Be Sung and Danced

  I have seen a man survive

  with a hundred wounds from a lance

  and later saw him die

  from just a single glance.

  Down in the sea a whale

  sighed and sighed again

  and his sighings told this tale:

  “He who has love, has pain.”

  Today I want to sing

  now that I have no sorrow,

  in case the fates should bring

  tears to my eyes tomorrow.

  (196)

  1598: Panama City

  Times of Sleep and Fate

  Simón de Torres, apothecary of Panama, would like to sleep but cannot take his eyes off the hole in the roof. Each time his lids close, his eyes open by themselves and fasten on the hole. Simon lights and puts out his pipe and lights it again, trying to discourage the mosquitos with the smoke and with his hand. He twists and turns, soaking and boiling in the bed that was left crooked by the shock it received the other day. The stars wink at him through the hole and he would like to stop thinking. So the hours pass until the rooster crows, either announcing the day or calling the hens.

  A week ago a woman tumbled through the roof and fell on Simon.

  “Who, who, who are you?” the apothecary stammered.

  “We don’t have much time,” said she as she tore off her clothes.

  In the morning she got up, shining, delicious, and dressed herself in no time flat.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To Nombre de Dios. I left the bread in the oven there.”

  “But that’s twenty leagues away!” cried the apothecary.

  “Only eighteen,” she corrected him. And as she disappeared, she said: “Take care of yourself. Whoever enters me loses his memory.”

  (157)

  1599: Quito

  The Afro-Indians of Esmeraldas

  They keep on the alert. They don’t bat an eyelash. They are full of suspicion. That brush that robs them of their image, won’t it rob them of their souls? The brush is magic like the mirror. Like the mirror, it takes possession of people.

  From time to time, the horrible cold of Quito makes them sneeze, and the artist growls at them. Uncomfortable, half strangled by the ruffs, they resume the poses, rigid until the next sneeze. They have been in this city a few days and they still can’t grasp why such powerful people have come to live in such a cold place, nor why the houses have doors, nor why the doors have locks, bolts, and padlocks.

  Half a century ago a storm dashed a slave ship against the coastal reefs, near the mouth of the Esmeraldas River. The ship contained slaves from Guinea to be sold in Lima. The blacks took off and lost themselves in the woods. They founded villages and had children with native women, and those children multiplied, too. Of the three whose portrait Andrés Sánchez Gallque is now painting, two were born of that mixture of Africans and Ecuadorean women. The other, Francisco de Arobe, came from Guinea. He was ten at the time of the shipwreck.

  They have been rigged out as distinguished gentlemen, tunics and cloaks, lace cuffs, hats, so as not to make a bad impression on the king when he receives, in Madrid, this portrait of his new subjects, these barbarians who have been invincible up to now. They also have lances in their hands, necklaces of teeth, and sea-shells over their Spanish dress; and on their faces are gold ornaments that pierce their ears, their nostrils, and their lips.

  (176)

  1599: Chagres River

  The Wise Don’t Talk

  This is the shiniest road on earth. From sea to sea winds the long, silver trail. Countless strings of mules cross the jungle, weighed down by the metals of Potosí, en route to the galleons waiting in Portobello.

  Little monkeys accompany the silver across Panama. Screaming without letup, they jeer at the muleteers and pelt them with guavas.

  On the banks of the Chagres River, Fray Diego de Ocaña watches them admiringly. To cross the river, the monkeys form a chain from the crown of a tree, clutching each other by the tails: the chain swings and gathers speed until a strong shove hurls it to the highest branches on the other bank.

  The Peruvian Indian carrying Ocaña’s baggage comes up to him and says: “Father, these are people. They don’t talk so that the Spaniards won’t notice it. If they see that they’re people, they’ll send them to work in the mines.”

  (157)

  1599: La Imperial

  Flaming Arrows

  Rebellion breaks out on the Pacific coasts, and the repercussions shake the Andes cordillera.

  Martin García Óñez de Loyola, nephew of St. Ignatius, came here from Peru with the fame of a tireless hunter and crack killer. There he captured Túpac Amaru, last of the Incas. Then they sent him as governor to Chile to tame the Araucanians. Here he killed Indians, stole sheep, and burned crops without leaving a grain. Now the Araucanians are parading his head on the point of a lance.

  The Indians use Christians’ bones as trumpets to sound the call to battle. War masks, armor of leather: The Araucanian cavalry devastates the South. Seven towns fall, one after the other, under a rain of fiery arrows. The hunted become the hunters. The Araucanians lay siege to La Imperial. To deny it water, they alter the course of the river.

  Half of the realm of Chile, everything south of the Bío-Bío, becomes Araucanian again.

  The Indians say, pointing at the lance: This is my master. This won’t be ordering me to dig gold, nor to bring herbs or firewood, nor to mind the cattle, nor to sow or reap. I want to stay with this master.

  (66 and 94)

  1599: Santa Marta

  They Make War to Make Love

  Rebellion breaks out on the Caribbean coasts, and its repercussions shake the Sierra Nevada. The Indians are rising for the freedom to love.

  At the fiesta of the full moon, the gods dance in the body of Chief Cuchacique and lend magic to his arms. From the villages of Jeriboca and Bonda, the voices of war awaken the whole land of the Tairona Indians and shake Masinga and Masinguilla, Zaca and Mamazaca, Mendiguaca and Torama, Buritaca and Tairama, Maroma, Taironaca, Guachaca, Chonea, Cinto and Nahuanje, Mamatoco, Ciénaga, Dursino and Gairaca, Origua and Durama, Dibocaca, Daona,
Chengue and Masaca, Daodama, Sacasa, Cominca, Guarinea, Mauracataca, Choquenca and Masanga.

  Chief Cuchacique wears a jaguar skin. Arrows that whistle, arrows that burn, arrows that poison: The Taironas burn chapels, break crosses, and kill friars, fighting against the enemy god who prohibits their customs.

  Since time immemorial in these lands, anyone got a divorce who wanted one, and siblings made love if they felt like it, and women with men or men with men or women with women. Thus it was in these lands until the men in black and the men in iron came, they who throw to their dogs anyone loving as his ancestors loved.

  The Taironas celebrate their first victories. In their temples, which the enemy calls houses of the Devil, they play the flute on bones of the vanquished, drink corn wine, and dance to the lilt of drums and shell trumpets. The warriors have closed all passes and roads to Santa Marta and are preparing the final assault.

  (189)

  1600: Santa Marta

  They Had a Country

  The fire takes time to catch. How slowly it burns.

  Grindings of metal, armored men in motion. The assault on Santa Marta has failed and the governor has passed a sentence of annihilation. Weapons and soldiers have arrived from Cartagena in the nick of time and the Taironas, bled white by so many years of tribute and slavery, scatter in defeat.

  Extermination by fire. Burning villages and plantations, cornfields and cottonfields, cassava and potato crops, fruit orchards. The irrigated plantings that delighted the eye and gave food, the farmlands where the Taironas made love in full daylight, because children made in the dark are born blind—everything burns.